Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story Read online

  Mal didn’t answer. He found his charm in looking grave. He had difficulty focusing on the child, whose nose was dripping, whose little face was the color of the seat. His hands were swelling. His eyes were silting up. When the woman realized that he wasn’t going to answer, she shifted her eyes up and to the left, to pretend that she had never been addressing him at all, and wiped her hands on the baby’s shirt.

  “And me,” she said, “only twenty and my sugar a soldier and far away.”

  The plane was being swatted around as though it were in the web of some enormous paw. A slice of jelly roll slid off a tray and flopped along the aisle, picking up in its cakey wet a bobby pin. Dust balls from the runner. Cigar ash. The stewardess had disappeared and the passengers began a slow liturgical wail. The lights blinked on and off, and the baby held his breath, the bridge of his nose turning blue.

  The young woman pinched the child’s cheeks. “I wish you was older so you could chew gum. That’d make you feel a whole lot better.” She was a mother and serene, wearing a dress with a sweet round collar spotted with drool, her head full of bone and small thoughts breaking softly. She was not really alarmed about the storm, though her mouth was dry, one incisor snagging upon her lip. Sooner or later, Mal knew, the child would be left somewhere, in a movie theater or behind the matches and soap, abandoned without malice or intent, vaguely remaindered like potatoes on a plate. But he would survive, he would manage, because this was a smart-looking baby, thin and desperate. Temples beating on grimly. Long ears throbbing like antennae. Her man was in Hawaii in flowered bikini trunks, with the beach in his sheets, with her grey from poor nutrition too much rice and peanut butter Mal knew having never eaten properly himself, her skin grey and slick and cool as a trout, and the child would just crawl off someplace, into some orange moon of light and be taken in by natives, growing up to dynamite fish. For sharks, he’d learn to chum first, to bring them in, and then to lob grenades into their mouths. He would learn like Mal must, to rectify, and the meat would run like milk. But with a woman he’d be fine. He’d rinse off his hands in clear tap water.

  Mal poked at his eye with a grievous thumb, then set to work weeding his eyelashes with his knuckles. Loosening, they made the very slightest pop a rough thicket with a pure white root. Through the plane’s tiny window, past the oily prints of former heads, the discarded complexions of weary passengers, there was nothing but an echoing pallor. White and foaming. Mistaken for a glass of someone else’s seltzer water, Mal was being drowned. Had he been born with a caul they had to cut? He could not remember. But what would protect him from the air? His mother was ripping along on the tides beneath him, far below the surface where there is no wind or breakage. His mother was trying to keep up, he knew, but the Captain had a lisp, and his medal had unloosened and was stabbing at his heart.

  In the hold, the pet dogs had given up howling and yapping at the engines. They had always lived unrealistically. Indignant with trust. They curled up tight with their noses deep beneath their tails.

  But the storm had a range, an appointed round, a latitude and longitude responsible to charts, and the plane passed through. The day bobbed up—an invalid’s morning, with the light like that after fever and chill, sharp and astonishing, white as a winding sheet. Everyone wiped up and retreated into bad habits. With the soul sinking back to a place between the armpit and the rib. No need to die when you’ve done it all up to it. A woman mouthed dreamily the hairs of her arm. The smell of death, that odor of sick animals, sweet like a nut and sulphurous, was taken up by comfy flatulence in rubber and wool. Everything proper. Steeping like tea.

  Mal ate his cheese sandwhich. The bread was wet from his frightened hip. It had beaded up and the mess tasted warm and hybrid. With one determined wince it was gone and they were over Fiji with the music on and the woman with the baby, eying someone else, kissing him the French way in her silly head’s eye.

  His heart ached as though she had bitten it with her small bright teeth. Mal the father, fatherless, rubbed his chest and squinted at the man she favored—a gentleman with a part taken out of his chin and a cast to his hairline, scowling and untouched by her gaze, the suede patches on his elbows all slick from a puzzling use. She had always wanted someone with a fetish or a profession, not a boy like Mal who loved without method or distinction, who, in a country where everyone had to be spoken and accounted for in some manner, was neither a cowboy or a surfer or a hunter and no one’s apprentice either, who had been banished from Australia, a land which refused almost nothing at all, rejected from Australia where even the poisoned rabbits are left lying on the land.

  He certainly looked like a professional man. A man with a hobby or a cure for something. He had shiny eyes. Sun-cracked lips. An enormous blue and red tiepin upon which was engraved

  MONZA AUTODROMO

  Mal began to hiccough nervously, orange cheese smell scrabbling at the back of his throat. He gulped and tried to hold his breath but air dribbled out between symmetrical gaps between two hind teeth where his smile—when he smiled which was seldom—stopped. He gripped the sides of the seat, burping softly, the cheese rising stultifyingly in his nose bubbly like a bog. The professional man arose and lumbered to a rear compartment, tipping toward Mal as he hurried along, his right knee dipping just before he crashed against his shoulder, braiding Mal’s torso like a rope while the part of him below the seat belt remained primly secure. The strange tiepin rapped sullenly against his eye, glowing like the eye of God. Mal lifted up his hand and snagged one finger in the wide buttonholes of the man’s tweeds, tearing the nail below the quick. Wordless, the man bored on, while the girl applied fresh lipstick and the baby spit up once more and again into another magazine as though this was its life’s sole occupation. Mal sucked his hand and the tears rose like an animal’s, awash and gleaming in the sockets, unfallen.

  He was frightened by the way people treated him. As though he were a table or a chair or a rock in the street, but worse than that, because at least those things they would use or avoid. Treating him instead as though they couldn’t see him. As though he had already moved on and they were performing over the space he had vacated. And he was going to America where mice were found in bottled Coca-Cola straight from the machine. Where girls were scalped by wheels and engines that stacked celery threshed wheat picked cherries hulled pecans. Where there were circuses and rodeos and games of skill, and people knowing things he would never even think about.

  Would he ever be able to escape? The dead boys ran away to sea misundertanding everything, for all they had wanted was the returning. Would he ever find a cute jelly to love him, to see him for what he was? Would he ever get the cure and set his momma’s heart to rest?

  He ordered a whiskey. It came in a tiny bottle with a tiny glass and napkin like a child’s tea set. There was a little paper dish with six peanuts in it. He ordered three more whiskeys and between swallows, sucked on his hand, trying to settle the nail back in place with his tongue.

  … his sweet momma who had danced with him, guiding him through the rooms of the settling house, into musty closets where moths drifted into his ears, dancing and rocking around and around, his nodding head clunking against her knobby pelvic bone. Riding on her wide fly-pocked feet when he tired. Around and around to the sounds of warped records. Huge birds resting one-legged on the lawn. Smell of low tide. Child bouncing a rubber ball against the privy wall.

  His poor momma eaten alive as she worked the sand out of her suit. Who only the day before had trimmed his nails and swabbed his eyes. They were always hemorrhaging mildly from his digging at them. They itched and burned. Along with his teeth and something deep within his ears that he could not get at.

  His sweet momma, her sharp bones bruising him every time she drew near, mending him every day, combing his thick hair with her fingers, combing and sweeping and patting it back until Mal thought he was dying, he felt so fine.

  He ordered two more whiskeys and brought his hands in close to hi
s chest as the man with the elbow patches shambled back up the aisle and didn’t even hesitate before he lowered himself into the empty seat beside the girl. He smiled at her and his teeth were all gold. The tiepin rose and bound as he settled, a part of him that was not so much accessory as guide. Like those plastic balls that divers attach to their weight belts so that they will know in the black unworld in which direction the surface is.

  Mal fell asleep while looking as the man turned his broad tweed back and hid the girl and baby from view.

  VII

  Injuries may be received from

  camels either through the bites

  from side kicks even when sitting down or from the animal

  knocking a person over and falling upon him with the breast pad

  He awoke in Los Angeles with the plane resting on its huge wheels. He was the only one on board. On the seat across the aisle was a powder puff and a rattle toy. Mal mopped up a bit of drool with his cuff, hoping he had not been sleeping with his mouth open. He was not able to disengage the buckle on his seat belt. It would have been useless to call the stewardess for the key. She was nowhere in sight and there wasn’t any place on the belt where a key would go. He writhed and writhed, the buttons on his shirt tearing away with the strain. The collar came askew. He could see rust marks from the wire hanger. He could see the slick of corn meal still embedded in the fabric where someone at the Church Relief Fund had taken the iron scorch from the sleeve.

  At last he slid out beneath the belt. He dropped the two unopened bottles into his pocket and buttoned his suit coat up to the neck to conceal the torn shirt. He walked out the door and into a black canvas tube which instead of sloping downward, remained level, throwing Mal off balance, causing him to bump against the soft walls. They were damp from the hot foggy night. It was as though he had collided with one of the sweating wrestlers he had watched so often in the free Sydney gyms. Loose soaking flesh with the scaffolding of bone beneath. Eyes blinded by the smother of hairless stomachs. Everything dark as concussion. Smooth as an egg.

  Mal stayed in the terminal for days, for he had no other idea of what to do. It was vast and white and teeming and timeless. He had to walk for twenty minutes just in order to find a glass that was really a window to the outside, to the day or the night and the greasy sky and the planes rising drearily and incessantly with steam and clamor.

  The toilets and movies were free. He saw The War Lover fourteen times. The aisles were terribly littered and Mal smashed a tonic bottle with his boot. No one turned about. They were all sleeping, grey in the backwash of the screen. Mal wished he had a leather flight jacket like the hero. If he had a jacket like that, lined with a sheep, fitting tight and casual, he’d be able to go anywhere.

  He spent a day and a half in the theatre. When he re-entered the main terminal, he felt as though he had stepped into a refrigerator. Everything white and whirring and ticking with great florescent lights. It was colder than he ever remembered it being in Australia, and he pulled his suit coat tighter across his shattered shirt.

  A boy Mal’s age stood outside a luncheonette, holding out a tray of samples. Sections of wieners dipped in a yellow sauce. Pierced by toothpicks with cellophane bows. Mal sidled up and took one, jabbing his lip, in his haste, with the toothpick. He extended a grimy arm to accept another but the boy turned with the tray.

  “Don’t pull that stuff on me,” he hissed. “I’ll call the cops.”

  Mal turned quickly away, aiming for an orange sling chair against the opposite wall, but the boy pursued him, saying “lunk lunk lunk,” as though he were choking, as though he were speaking through his lung. Mal slid into the chair, and the boy stood a few paces off, spitting by error onto the wieners.

  “Lunk lunk lunk lunk lunk,” he said. “Dope.” He stamped angrily back to his post, the yellow sauce staining his fingers, his hairline high and ragged.

  Mal stayed in one section of the terminal, in one acre, bounded on the north jog by a florist, on the south by a penny arcade, a steel pony at the entrance, the paint peeled from one eye, a quarter stuck in the box mounted on its mane. He sat quietly for the most part, his knees pressed together like a girl’s, eating pressed meat on a stiff and oily bun. Along the walls there were cages of drugged cats. Tags ringing against the mesh. Like boom rings clinking against masts. Odor of piss and wood chips. Ladies took their pills at drinking fountains. Hardening lumps of Chiclets mounted all around.

  He was beginning to get moles on his face. He tried to tidy himself up in the washroom, but the liquid soap, mounted in a glass bubble, screwed to the wall, irritated his skin, making his hands smell as though they had been packed in a paper trunk for the last decade. He had heard a great deal about moles. He didn’t want to violate them in any way. He changed his clothes in the washroom, putting on a worn pair of khakis and a green tee shirt. He folded the suit and put it carefully in his suitcase, over the coroner’s unreadable statement, between his momma’s hairbrushes and the only thing he had ever found in his life, a fillet knife, discovered on the beach between burnt bricks. Thin bones lying everywhere. Jaw of small fierce teeth pointing out to sea.

  He sat in the plastic sling chair, touching his eyes and the slick moles, trying to think.

  On the sixth day, the boy with the tray of samples came over to Mal. He was carrying brownies, each piece no bigger than a thumbnail. “I’m gonna call the man on you,” the boy snarled. “I’ve taken all I’m gonna take from you. You look so weird sittin’ there and I’ve taken all that I’m ever gonna take from you.”

  He walked away, the brownies popping all over his tray and a few minutes later returned with a man in a grey uniform and a sweatband grid around his head where his cap had been. It looked as though a very tiny truck had been motoring around his skull. He looked slightly to the left of Mal and high, higher than Mal’s head would be even if he were standing.

  “Awright,” he bawled. “Awright, whatarya trying to do, live your life in this place? Huh? Whatarya practicing here anyway?”

  Mal looked wildly about and began to pant. Beneath his light shirt his shoulder blades felt like a wooden coat hanger had been sewn cleverly beneath the skin. He felt the bulk of all his bones keeping him down, weighing him to the chair and he hunched forward and panted harder.

  “Since you don’t seem to be doing anything at the present,” the man said, “whyn’t you come with me and you can mow the lawn around the county jail.”

  Mal shook his head. His sternum was heaving around beneath his tee shirt. He imagined it leaping through the cloth and scaring them all to death.

  “Oh, then you must be waiting on somebody, huh,” the man said.

  “He ain’t waiting on nobody. You’d best believe that. He’s just weird is all. Sitting here for a week. Taking advantage. Like to drive me nuts.” The boy, pale with indignation, had been clawing at the brownies. The tray was covered only with crumbs. The crumbs were blowing around and settling on everything.

  “You waiting on somebody, boy?” the man asked Mal.

  A girl walked out of the penny arcade. She wore a short faded dress and her hair was in a long yellow braid that hung down past her waist. The braid was tied with yarn and the loopy bow of it swayed below the hem of her dress. She wore dark glasses and yellow tennis shoes and carried a card. She walked over and stood between the man and Mal and said, “We’re together and we’re leaving. This here is my escort to Texas.”

  She patted Mal on the shoulder. She smelled clean and leafy as though she’d been swimming in a lake, and Mal got up and followed her away just as though he’d been free all the time to do just that.

  VIII

  Walt Faulkner, sole survivor of the

  factory Lincoln team, was driving like

  a madman. Coming into Mexico City,

  peasants lined both sides of the road 50

  deep, touching the cars with their fingers as they thundered past. Faulkner

  never slowed his charge. He boomed thru
/>   the tunnel of humanity flat out. Later,

  when someone asked what he would have done

  had he plowed into the mob, he replied,

  “Turn on the windshield wipers.”

  It was a large white car. A very sensual car. Hot remote white and air-cooled, chilling his knees. An orange butterfly smashed delicately on the left headlight. Mal felt loving. His thick hair fell past his eyes, socked in the hollows of his cheeks. A balloon torso of a man tilted slightly toward the tinted glass on the passenger side. A plasticine mask on the bullet shaped head a real cloth coat and a clip-on tie. Wearing a cream ten-gallon hat. The girl turned a rubber petcock where the lap should have begun, flattened him out, folded him up and put him in her saddlebag handbag.

  At a Texaco station they soaped off the butterfly and pumped 26 gallons into the machine while the girl talked incessantly and fed Mal Eskimo Pies and fried chicken and honey from a cardboard box. The cold of the ice cream sang in his teeth. The honey dripped down through his fingers and onto the cards that she showed him. One card was made of thick cardboard and on one side it said

  A STRANGER IS THE WAY

  and on the other side there was a drawing of a horseshoe and the words

  KEEP ME SOMEWHERE IN YOUR HOME

  AND YOUR LOVE WILL NEVER ROAM

  “That’s what slid out of the fortune-telling machine in the arcade,” the girl said. “Same time I saw you sitting there this nickel card fell into my hand. The gypsy doll there in the corner between the hockey game and the bear shoot? You know?”

  She gave him the other card. It said